Usona Esperantisto № 2019:1 (jan-feb)

Review: Crusoes in Siberia

For many speakers of English, the name Soros brings to mind George
Soros, the American billionaire famous for his investing and
philanthropy. For many speakers of Esperanto, the name brings an
additional person to mind: Tivadar Soros, a Hungarian lawyer and author
made famous by — among other things — his harrowing adventures in
the two World Wars.

While Tivadar’s adventures were well-known to some, for years they
remained largely unknown to the English-speaking world. That’s
because Soros wrote for an international audience using Esperanto, a
language that would play a significant role in his family’s life.
Son György, for example, would use the language to escape communist
Hungary for England. (Later, György — or George — would emigrate
to America and become the famous billionaire.) Esperanto can even be
found in the family’s name: given the virulently anti-semitic climate
in 1930s Europe, Tivadar thought it best to change his surname from
Schwartz to Soros, an Esperanto word meaning “will soar.”

And soar he did. Not only did Soros survive his experiences as a
prisoner in the First World War, but later — with much guile and a
bit of luck — he also managed to save his family from extermination
in Nazi-occupied Hungary. The latter story is recounted in Maskerado
ĉirkaŭ la morto (UEA,
1965), a book first appearing in English translation as
Masquerade: Dancing Around Death in Nazi
Hungary (Arcade, 2000).
After the Second World War, in part with profits received as a
publisher of the Esperanto literary magazine Literatura
Mondo, Soros was able to help his family escape to the
West.

It was in the June, 1923 issue of that magazine that Soros began
serializing the narrative of his escape from a prison camp in World
War I. He called it Modernaj Robinzonoj en la Siberia Praarbaro
(“Modern Robinsons in the primeval Siberian forest”). In 1999 the
collection was republished in book form by publisher Eldonejo Bero,
along with historical notes by Humphrey Tonkin (in Esperanto). That
edition is no longer available from Esperanto-USA, but as of press
time it is still in stock at
UEA. In 2011, also
thanks to Tonkin, the story finally became available in English
translation as Crusoes in Siberia (Mondial).

The title is a reference to the sort of plain, unornamented adventure
tales that Soros enjoyed in his youth. In such fictional
“Robinsonades” — named after Defoe’s eponymous hero Robinson Crusoe
— the protagonist finds himself stranded in a remote wilderness,
forced to endure a series of perilous adventures in order to return to
civilization. Soros’s story is told in much the same style, but it
isn’t fiction.

The story begins in 1914, when the Great War erupted in Europe and a
young Tivadar Soros, then a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
enlisted to fight on behalf of his country. By 1915, he was a prisoner
of war. Like many other Hungarian captives, Soros was imprisoned far from
the front: the Russians shipped him to a camp near Khabarovsk — over
5,000 miles from Moscow — where he spent five years in captivity.

During that time the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, leaving Soros
a man without a country. And Russia was torn apart by civil war between
Bolshevik (Red) and Tsarist (White) armies. The Russian Far East
became an especially chaotic place, with White and Red forces
struggling for dominance amid incursions by the Imperial Japanese Army
and the American Expeditionary Force. Soros and his fellow soldiers
found themselves alternately prisoners of the Russians, then the
Americans, and finally the Japanese.

In 1920, with White armies in retreat, the victorious Bolsheviks began
retaking the prison camps and executing prisoners. Soros and his men
decided it was time to risk an escape, and thus began their long
journey home through the taiga.

In documenting the adventure, Soros took pains to craft a story that
stands on its own. His narrative is largely abstracted from its
historical setting, making it accessible to readers without a
background in the political intrigues of the period. (All the better
for the modern reader, for whom the Great War is now largely forgotten.)
Of course, many of the challenges Soros encountered were not unique to
that particular conflict. His story deals with elements of the human
experience common to every war: fear, pestilence, misery,
fleeting joy, and hunger.

Especially hunger. In one chapter we get to share the author’s shock
upon meeting Dolfi and Sepi, a pair of Austrians who had managed to
survive alone for two years in the forest:

“So, tell us. What was the worst of your adventures?” I once asked
in curiosity, during a conversation about the terrors and perils of
the taiga.

“When we ate our comrade Hans.”

Dolfi dug Sepi in the ribs.

“Aren’t you ashamed to talk about such things?” Dolfi whispered, but
Sepi none the less quietly continued his story.

“At the time there were ten of us living together. To begin with,
there were thirty in the group, but death with its healthy
appetite consumed the rest. Hunger tore at our guts: we had nothing
to put in our bellies. We had eaten the last remains of a horse and
we were already chewing desperately on its hooves and hair. The
effects of hunger turned Hans crazy. We could hardly send him to
the hospital, because there was no hospital to send him to. In fact
if anyone got sick in the forest, or got wounded, there was no help
for him, and without a doctor he simply closed his eyes and went to
sleep forever. So what could we do for our unfortunate comrade? We
were hungry too, and so … we ate him. As we ate, we talked of his
and our unhappy fate. Later we ate someone else, but he had it
coming to him: we punished him because he was guilty. He stole food
from our provisions …. But he tasted better than they did. Right,
Sepi?”

While one can certainly enjoy (or perhaps endure) such accounts apart
from their historical context, modern readers may still have
questions. For example, “How did Soros end up all the way over in
Siberia?” Or, “What were Japanese and American armies doing in
Russia?” And so on. Few such questions are addressed in the
narrative; in fact, Soros never even mentions in which army he
fought. He adopts a carefully nonpartisan tone, suspending the
adventure in a sort of political vacuum. This approach makes sense
considering the multinational audience for whom he was writing, at a
time when the politics of the conflict were well known to most
readers. For those of us a century removed, however, more context is
needed.

Thankfully, translator Humphrey Tonkin was given space for a sizeable
introduction. (Publisher Mondial deserves special credit for this;
English-language publishers tend to be squeamish about allowing
translator’s forewords, fearing that readers will reflexively
avoid translations that advertise themselves as such.) In effect,
Tonkin becomes our guide to the adventure — and even a sort of
co-author — lending the story a significance that it would otherwise
lack. Tonkin is a master of English prose, and he’s intimately
familiar with the history of the period. His detailed maps, footnotes
and appendices make him the ideal travel companion.

Tonkin describes Soros’s prose as artless, much like Defoe’s
unvarnished narrative in Crusoe. And the text is indeed artless in
that sense: it presents its story in an accessible, unpretentious
manner. But Soros is certainly not without skill. His narrative
captivates with its palpable details, made all the more compelling
when we realize that they chronicle actual events:

From one day to the next, the flies and mosquitoes made our life
less and less tenable. Every hour of the day and night seemed to
have its particular species of fly. In the morning and at night the
chief problem was mosquitoes, in the middle of the day enormous
flies, and in the afternoon swarms of tiny ones. And their numbers
were beyond all measure. Occasionally they attacked us with such
fury that, despite our attempts to defend ourselves, they literally
filled our mouths and eyes. We had no mosquito nets, and the sheets
that we created for ourselves were not very effective; the bites
made our heads swell up like pumpkins.

The horses suffered even more than we did. By flailing about with
our arms we were able to drive the various blood-sucking flies away
from us, but our poor horses were helpless, and their tails simply
could not fend off the millions of flies and mosquitoes. The gray
horse, for example, turned completely black with flies and dried
blood from their bites. Every time we stopped to rest, we built a
big fire of green sticks to protect the horses with the smoke.

One translation challenge for Tonkin was the age of the text; like
other living languages, Esperanto has evolved noticeably since Soros
wrote his story in the 1920s. What’s more, those who’ve read the
original may have noticed that Soros’s style is not particularly
“English-like” — I suspect it conforms more closely to the rhythms
of his native Hungarian. That style fortunately poses no problems in
Esperanto; the syntactic and morphological flexibility of the language
allow it adapt to a variety of national idioms, and Soros’s original
text certainly flows well enough. But if it were translated too literally
into a language as idiomatic and unforgiving as English, the
result could sound clumsy or wooden.

Faced with such challenges, some translators strive to retain a sense
of “difference” in their translations — perhaps by imitating an
antiquated style of English to indicate age, or by adopting awkward
turns of phrase to retain foreignness. Other translators strive to
“domesticate” their translations, making them sound idiomatically
native and modern.

Tonkin skillfully treads a middle ground, remaining faithful to the
original text while domesticating details that could cause unnecessary
distraction. The result is a story as accessible as Soros’s
original, with just a hint of foreignness to admit its age and
origins. That foreignness is not so great as to necessarily
reveal the text as a translation, but it’s enough to maintain the
“difference” appropriate to a tale from a different era and culture.

In other words, the English version of the story flows in much the
same way as the Esperanto original, leaving a very similar impression.
To me, that’s a sign of a successful translation.

As a bonus, the volume includes Tonkin’s translation of a
short fable (The Fairest Judgment) that Soros published in
Literatura Mondo under the pseudonym Teo Melas.